Now your task is to offer alternative courses of action to the visitor. You know that a 404 error page is like a dead end. This enables the lost visitor to search for what they are looking for on the site. Remember, one of the primary reasons why we’re creating a custom 404 page is to replace the blunt and annoying “page cannot be displayed” message with something which is less likely to chase away visitors.Īlso, ensure to place a search box at a prominent location in your custom 404 page. Now, before we go about creating your custom 404 error page, there are some things that you need to keep in mind: Check out our range of web hosting plans here. If you’re reading this and haven’t already got hosting for your website, we can help with that. You begin by creating a new webpage on your site (either on your CMS such as WordPress, or a regular HTML page/PHP script). More on truly excellent 404 pages at the end of this article…Ĭreating a custom 404 page is fairly easy but does require a little coding and design. If you create a truly unique, engaging, amusing 404 page, visitors will want to tell the world. This way you encourage your user to keep browsing.ĭifficult to achieve, but possible. Provide a site search option or a site map link. Otherwise, they’ll have to go all the way back to the homepage and rummage through the site’s contents to find what they are looking for (if they stay at all).īy making the 404 page friendly and welcoming, you can ease your visitor’s frustration, rather than increasing it with a blunt “Error” pasted across the page.Ĭustomise the error page to make it resemble the other pages of the site. Include a set of links to popular pages on your site and try to tempt a lost visitor to continue browsing. There are many advantages to be had by creating a custom 404 page for the website, some of which include: On the other hand, a friendly and engaging 404 page will help prevent your visitor from exiting your page and encourage them to check out other sections of the site, effectively decreasing bounce rates. Thus, an unfriendly and blunt 404 page may result in visitors being dissatisfied or annoyed with the site’s user interface and cause them to swiftly exit your site. It essentially forms a dead-end for the visitor, since they can do nothing else but return to the homepage or go to a different site. 404 is an error that is displayed when the server fails to locate the page or file that the user requests.